It’s all about inside out.

One of the fundamental reasons why we suffer and why we don’t achieve all that we can achieve is that we do not intrinsically feel worthy of love, or “good enough” from the inside out — I will repeat that, because it is so important. We need to figure out how to feel good enough and worthy of love and respect and happiness and success from the inside out. This means that REGARDLESS of what happens in our life, REGARDLESS of what happens in our day, REGARDLESS of how awesome or crappy things go or how awesome or crappy we are treated, we KNOW we are good enough, we KNOW we are worthy of happiness, success and love. No matter what. We do not find our worth from our external world, we find it from the inside out. Intrinsic worth, not contingent worth. Even on our worst day, even with our biggest mistakes, we are worthy of love.

While we may intellectually know this is important and think that we believe it, few of us are good at it in practice, moment to moment.

There are countless situations where we encounter hidden insecurities or misconceptions around what is healthy and true. If you start to be more mindful through out your day you will start to see them. We get swept up in the external rewards and validations and forget that those external stimuli (money, stuff, likes) are NOT what is important. Yes, they are nice, they can add to the joy of life, but we need to find inner joy regardless of whether the external sweetness is present or not. Here’s the trick: do what sparks joy for the sake of the joy, not for the reward or expectation of a rewards. Who knows what will come, but if you did it purely because it felt right to do, you are golden. Trust it is the higher path and it will be.

Conversely when we make mistakes, which can be small (I forgot my keys again) or big and painful, with far reaching consequences to people we deeply care about, it is very hard to stay in a positive place and not shift into feeling that you aren’t good enough. Here’s the trick — even in the face of our biggest mistakes and setbacks, we need to know that these are learning opportunities and course corrections that we needed to have in order to gain the strength and clarity for what is to come next. Get back up, dust yourself off, and move forward.

The same issue pops up frequently in relationships. It feels so good for people to like us, to give us positive attention and affection. It feels so unpleasant (at best, terrifying at worst) when the attention and affection shifts to someone else. The loss of the positive energy from the other person naturally will be sad and we want to allow ourselves to grieve/ hold space for whatever feelings pop up… But remembering to practice surrender and trust life, that if someone is meant to be in your life they will be, and love is not a zero sum game. Don’t ever feel like you NEED to be the most important thing in someone’s life, because if that is how you feel, it is 100% coming from a place of insecurity…. and this will lead to the relationship being very unhealthy. And remember this: if you allow someone’s attention to make you feel worthy of love, you are giving your power away to that person. If they take their attention away and you no longer feel worthy of love, your power is in their hands. We cannot allow any situation in our life where we feel or believe that we are not enough or not worthy of love. Intellectually hopefully we know that we can never please everyone, and we need to figure out how to be ourselves and not care so much what people think, on any level, or we are going to be unhappy a lot of the time. Again, giving our power away to other people.

To wrap up, if we are looking outside for your validation of worth, for that feeling of being good enough, whether it is in the form of relationships, compliments, rewards, achievements or financial success, we are in a seriously weakened state. Focus on loving yourself and accepting yourself from the inside out and this will move you towards an empowered and fulfilled life.